Turner was circumspect. “That’s my guy,” he said of Revis. “But it’s competitive. It’s O against D. I’m a physical receiver. He’s a physical corner. I’m doing whatever’s on the card, and if he felt it wasn’t a good look, that’s how he felt. It’s tricky to run somebody’s route unless you’re watching his film.”
A day or two later the two spoke: “You good?” Revis asked Turner.
“I’m good,” Turner told him.
“Okay!” said Revis. “We’re cool.”
Turner said yes, they were cool.
In the defensive meeting the Sunday morning before the Monday-night game, the players and coaches reviewed the practice film. When they reached the Revis/Turner fight, Pettine began narrating—“Feels him out with a jab! Loads up with a right! Devastating punch!” At the sight of Westerman wading into the melee, Pettine asked, “What’s the rule?” Westerman had grabbed a green defense jersey instead of a white offense shirt. “I grabbed a white guy!” Westerman said and even Pettine couldn’t stop laughing. “Hey,” said Westerman, looking a little confused. “I got a lot of white friends!”
During the pre–game-day walk-through, there were the usual conversations among the players. MTV recalled his experiences as an incorrigible seventh-grade brawler in Hayward, California. The reserve nose tackle said that everybody he ran with then was a juvenile delinquent. “We all had to struggle, none of us were set. We were in the streets.” His father was “gone,” his mother worked three jobs, and so his informal gang of friends were the people he relied on. “Gangs and football teams are similar,” MTV said. “They both are like family environments.” One day at school, MTV punched an eighth-grader. On the way home, a Mustang full of kids pulled up beside him, and he was saved only because a man from the neighborhood saw what was happening and ran the kids off. The next thing MTV knew, his older brothers intervened, and he was sent to a group home in a wine-country town of fewer than a thousand people. One brother was there too. He’d broken some kid’s jaw. At the local high school, MTV had a wonderful teacher who interested him in books—especially the Iliad. He began dating the class president. She had a 4.0 GPA and suspicious parents—“Rightfully so. I was really thug.” The high-school football team had only thirteen or fourteen members, but twelve were from the group home, and “we bombed on the football field!” Almost every kid he met there was from a single-parent family, “just like football.” He was now twenty-three and still dating the class president.
Julian Posey was talking about the draft process, why it had taken him so long to come around to the Jets on signing day. The Bears, he said, had been in touch all the way through the lockout. But he preferred the Jets for all the reasons DT had told him he would. Said Posey, “If you can play Jets style, physical press corner, you can play anywhere. I say it, ‘If you can do the grill work, you can cook anywhere!’ ” After college, the NFL-rookie life of getting up at five in the morning, lifting weights at six thirty, and then attending football meetings and practices until at least six at night was grueling for Posey. He said he sometimes found staying awake for so many hours in the dark meeting rooms “more than hard.” Before he’d been cut, in his free time Posey had shopped and gone to movies, restaurants, shows, and clubs. No more. He realized “how serious it is. It’s very, very serious and you’re respected only for what you do in here.” In meetings now, to keep himself alert, he drank lots of very cold things like water and Gatorade and ate sunflower seeds. And he went to bed early. “You can’t burn the candle.”
Posey remained quite literally wide-eyed, and the veteran players, especially Cromartie and Leonhard, liked and felt protective of him. Out at practice they were always pulling him over to pass along tips and encouragement. You’d see them talking, Posey’s helmet bobbing in agreement, those eyes urgent behind the mask. “He so clearly wants to be good,” said Leonhard. “It’s like watching a little kid trying to mold himself into his parents. He’s so innocent. He hasn’t been jaded.”
After the Dolphins, the Jets would play the San Diego Chargers. The Sunday afternoon before the Dolphins game, most of the coaches tended their yards, played with their children, or caught up on sleep, but Smitty spent the sun-drenched autumn day alone in his windowless office, carefully drawing plays the Chargers favored for the following week’s practice cards. After the Chargers game would come the Jets bye week, and Smitty would rest then. As he sat at his computer and drew, Smitty imagined Devlin’s reaction when he saw the cards: “I hope Dev will think, That’s a really good one! And what if it’s that one play that makes a difference? Nicky,” he counseled, “precision takes time.”
The stretch of hours alone for Smitty was welcome even if they were spent at the office. Pettine’s town house had been visited by Pettine’s sister, and she had unbachelored the joint. There were fresh towels, fresh sheets, freshened air, bright décor. The dead tree had been banished. Much as Smitty revered Pettine, Pettine was still Smitty’s boss, and Smitty’s home was still his boss’s house. His father’s illness weighed on Smitty. And so did the losing. In a meeting during the week, O’Neil had teased Smitty and managed to do the near impossible—get Smitty really mad, mad enough to tell O’Neil, “You have the worst laugh I’ve ever heard.” When everyone in the room cracked up, Smitty looked surprised. Then he smiled in spite of himself and joined them.
“Hi, Worm,” Brunell said when I walked into the quarterbacks’ meeting that evening at the hotel.
“Can I have a promotion?” I asked. They’d been calling me Worm now for two weeks; being around them was beginning to feel like the worst part of seventh grade.
“How about Creep!” Sanchez said. He wore a ski hat with a pom-pom, a hoodie, and a watch almost as large as an alloy wheel and just as shiny. I knew how it went. The point was to make the new guy feel foolish. In the oil fields, the least experienced roughnecks were all called Worm. In the Vietnam War they were cherries. Later Callahan told me the bad news: “Once they give it to you, that’s it, it’s yours, you’re it.” I couldn’t blame them. If I was going to come in and sit with them and watch them lose, I deserved to prove to them that I could handle something too.
It was Schotty’s birthday, and Sanchez had ordered pizza for all. Schotty scarcely seemed to notice. He was reviewing the openers, the new sheet of plays he planned to use at the beginning of drives, and even creating such a document made him anxious. He told the players several times to put the sheet somewhere safe—“This is valuable stuff, men.” A pass to Holmes, “hauling ass to get to the far pylon,” had the coordinator very optimistic. “If there’s ever been a call ready to get dialed, it’s this one,” he said. “It was gonna win the New England game for us.”
At the game, Ryan made a symbolic gesture to address team unity that others called “typically Rex.” Each week the head coach chose game captains to run out to the middle of the field for the coin toss. For this duty, Ryan tended to select players for whom the game might have personal significance—players from the state where the game was being played, or a player who’d formerly been a member of that day’s opposing team. This week, he sent Santonio Holmes and Brandon Moore out together. This did not immediately yield offensive solidarity. “Rhythm!” Tannenbaum kept pleading in his box. Alas, there was none of that, and also no tempo, no syncopation, no backbeat—and thus no first-quarter first downs. Many seconds disappeared from the clock before Sanchez ran each play. It was, to use a favored phrase of Carrier’s, bad ball. After a quarter, the Dolphins offense had accumulated 173 yards; the Jets offense only 10. “How can that be?” Tannenbaum asked. At the end of every game the GM went home with a migraine headache. Now he already felt the aura. Miraculously, the Jets were ahead in the game, all because Revis had returned an interception one hundred yards. Later Rev picked off another, leading the Jets to a 24–6 victory and leading his coaches to wonder why anybody would throw anywhere near him. To Ryan, it was a football axiom. The “Revis Rule” held that on whatever side stood Revis, the
throw should go to the unequal and opposite side.
On Tuesday, in his office with his assistants gathered around him like courtiers, Tannenbaum made a flurry of roster moves. MTV, who had been in the middle of a goal-line stand against the Dolphins, was demoted back to the practice squad. Eron Riley, a receiver, was brought in. Scotty McKnight remained. Taking in the situation, Scott Cohen said thinly what many were thinking: “Scotty McKnight must have pull around here.” Out the window, the practice-worn fields were being reconfigured and relined; the new arrangement rotated the gridiron by ninety degrees, so the less trampled grass near the end zones would now form the middle. A few player agents were checked in with, and the medical people gave their reports of who among the injured Jets was likely to play on Sunday against the Chargers. Then Tannenbaum began musing about Sanchez’s present state of mind. “Mark is twenty-five,” the GM said, “and he’s human. The owner says this to him. The head coach says this. The coordinator says this. He hears a snippet of ESPN radio on his way home. If you were twenty-five, your mind would be swirling a little too.”
Downstairs, Ryan, wearing a “Dear Lord, If You Can’t Make Me Skinny, Please Make My Friends Fat” T-shirt, was eating peanut butter and chocolate while Pettine, in a black Foo Fighters T-shirt, was considering the color and the shape of success: “When you win, the food tastes better, the beer tastes better, and the sex is better.” Then the defensive coordinator looked at the head coach and summarily banned all foodstuffs from his office. At 8:43 in the evening, O’Neil told Smitty, Sutton, and DT, “Boys, we got to get Pet going. Only two calls up!” True, some additional calls in the plan were known as lemon juice. These were the ones the players knew so well they weren’t written down. The origin had to do with the old children’s spy trick of using lemon juice as invisible ink. By four thirty in the morning, the lack of rest was acute, but the game plan was finished.
At the Wednesday quarterbacks’ meeting the next morning, Sanchez was buoyant. Maybe he was savoring the Miami victory or, more likely, a long-carried weight had been lifted. Sanchez had heard Tom Moore would be coming for a visit from South Carolina. “Field trip!” the quarterback cried. “I’m smoking cigarettes with him.” Schotty was also feeling better. When Brunell answered one of his questions correctly, Schotty said, “Way to go, Bru! Gold star! Have fun at Benihana tonight!” McElroy’s cast had been removed, leading the others to mock him for all the typing Schotty would now get out of him. McElroy was spending his time studying football and lifting weights five days a week. In college, McElroy had bench-pressed nearly four hundred pounds. When the swingman Josh Baker heard about this, he took in McElroy’s red hair and said, “No ginger could do that.” Among the players, Baker’s line was repeated and repeated. They couldn’t get enough of it. Not playing was wearing on McElroy. The rookie was thinking of avoiding practice because just watching made him “depressed.”
As usual, Schotty took every available second, so the quarterbacks had to hurry down the hall to be on time for the team meeting, where they heard Ryan announce that Revis was the AFC’s defensive player of the week. As for the offense’s perpetual poor starts to games, the head coach looked over at Sanchez and advised him to take the field at the beginning of the game and “pretend it’s the second quarter.” Afterward, in the defensive room, Pettine congratulated his recrudescent players for becoming again “ourselves.” Then he took them through the game plan like a lawyer making his case, every call’s intent explained with care.
At practice, the air was mellow, the spirits same. Bart Scott was back to cheerfully calling white-shirted offenders slapdickmotherfuckers, and in Mo Wilkerson’s direction he cried, “Hootie Hoo Temple Owl!” BT arrived on crutches, his first visit to his teammates since his injury. BT said he was lonely at home, needed the company.
Nobody played harder than Aaron Maybin. Maybin was one of the only players on the team I’d ever heard talk about what he would do after football. He’d studied art and hoped to paint, draw, write, and illustrate children’s books. Maybe it was that he had a visual, not numerical, mind, for something about football plays failed to achieve purchase with Maybin. He was a bright, interesting person who simply couldn’t remember Xs and Os. So Smitty made him a wristband with everything written down on it for him. But Maybin still had gone the wrong way on a couple of calls, mishaps that led Pettine to suggest two wristbands.
At the Flavia coffee machine before the morning defensive meeting, Marcus Dixon assessed the various choices of brew. “ ‘Dark and intense,’ ” he read. “Just like me!” In the meeting, everyone was treated to another sampling from the Pettine cache of young Mike DeVito photographs. Today’s exhibit was DeVito in full pirate regalia. “Mike must have had a great childhood,” said Maybin. “I never had a pirate hat or nothing.” Suddenly Pettine looked out at Wilkerson. “What game number are we playing, Mo?”
“What game number?”
“Yes.”
“Seven!”
“Seven means time to stop being a rookie.”
A big question for game planning against the Chargers was whether San Diego’s seven-time Pro-Bowl tight end Antonio Gates would play. Pettine had heard that the Chargers were building a second, contingency game plan in case Gates couldn’t go. Carrier spoke up, warning his linemen to stay aware of Kris Dielman, the Chargers All-Pro guard, who was known for very physical play. There were two types of players: those who played to the official’s whistle, and those who played through it. With Dielman, if you could hear the echo of the whistle, he was still coming at you. Carrier didn’t want anyone letting up early and getting trucked.
Afterward, they all divided into positional groupings, and Pettine went to his office. Pettine no longer attended the outside-linebacker meetings. He’d ceded the room to Smitty. The senior coaches believed that Smitty was progressing so well because, unlike most former players who’d decided they’d like to coach, he didn’t ever lament his vanished playing career, and he no longer thought of himself as a player. Instead, he willingly accepted that he had a new profession that required even more of his time than playing had and for which he was paid a tiny percentage of his previous income. The game was about the players. A coach’s perspective had to shift so that everything he looked at, he saw through the prism of the players’ experience, the way a father would see a seaplane and become excited because his young son was interested in them. Smitty understood the game, both the practicalities and the spirit of it, and he was also generous, a man who wanted the best for others. That was a coach.
During practice, DeVito fell to the ground, rose, and fell back. As he was helped off the field into the facility, the sidelines were quiet. Twenty minutes later DeVito remerged, wearing a knee brace. Po’uha ran over and hugged him. Dixon gave him a relieved head rub. “He’s back for morale,” said one coach, doubtful that the injury was minor. Countered Pettine, “In a game they would have braced him up and he would have returned. Mild strain.”
During the break, along the sidelines, Leonhard and the veteran linebackers reviewed sports movies. Hoosiers? “Too boring,” said David Harris. “Too many white people?” countered Leonhard. Then came Lucas. “Never heard of it,” offered Calvin Pace. “You been watching PBS?” Harris asked him. The all-linebacker panel agreed that some of the most entertaining sports movies were The Best of Times, The Program, and Blue Chips. None of these films was deemed terribly realistic, but life was not a movie.
The football existence, however, meant that documentary film dominated your days. At that afternoon’s defensive-backs’ meeting, included among the Jets/Chargers film that DT showed the players was two-year-old footage of former Jet Lito Sheppard not having his best day against the Charger receivers in the playoffs. As the film rolled, Marquice Cole narrated DT’s in-game response to the situation. First, said Cole, DT gave Sheppard a nod of the head that Cole said meant “Son, come stand by me.” Sheppard offered his coach a solemn gesture in return that Cole called “the TV nod.” This Shepp
ard immediately followed up with the “Coach, I’m ready to go back in” nod. To which DT responded with the “Son, you stay right here by me.” Cromartie had still been a Charger during the playoff. “This game was so funny,” he said. Speaking of the San Diego offense, he remembered, “They’d come to the sidelines and say, ‘They’re coming from everywhere! I can’t see shit!’ ”
For Chargers week, Don Martindale, the former Broncos defensive coordinator, again visited the Jets defensive coaches. He offered an analysis of the Jets struggling offense. Martindale said that if you really pushed Schotty and Cav, “they’d say they don’t have an acceptable quarterback right now.” No matter how many different plays Schotty developed for Sanchez, Martindale said, in years past, the Jets had never felt like a complex opponent to him. He always had a pretty good idea what Sanchez would do. Schotty, Martindale guessed, badly missed having Brad Smith this season. “He put me on my heels. I had to think about him and I couldn’t think about the rest as much.” Martindale thought Ryan was frustrated with the offense’s inability to establish the running game but wouldn’t intervene because he would have hated someone doing that to him. Martindale, like Tannenbaum, wished Ryan would intervene. “You don’t get many chances to be a head coach,” Martindale warned his friend.
Friday was a typical NFL day, a lot going on at the facility. In the morning newspapers, Pettine was quoted expressing the defensive coaches’ exasperation at the inconsistencies of Cromartie, explaining that early in each game, he and DT would assess which Cro they had that week, Good Cro or Bad Cro. It was unusual for the coordinator to speak publicly in the terms he used in coaching meetings.
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